What is the ultimate advice I can offer as the Internet of Things Advisor and Trainer? Do not deploy an IoT system… … because everyone is doing so, … because that is the way to stay relevant, … because people say that you will fall behind. A poorly designed and implemented IoT solution… … won’t modernize your enterprise, … will cost you time and money, … will harm your operations.

Introduction I received an interesting question on the DevHeads community discord: “When to use one over the other between Amazon DynamoDB and S3 for storage?”. Short answer Two principal factors define data storage: The nature of the data itself. The way we want to consume it. Discussion For our discussion, I will categorize the data provided by IoT devices into four categories: Time-series telemetry readings. Complex readings. Batch data. Custom. By no means is that a comprehensive list, but it illustrates the primary use cases.

I tried to make ChatGPT generate the AWS Cloud infrastructure required to send telemetry messages from devices to the cloud backend. I asked it to use the AWS CDK to describe infrastructure as code so I could deploy that setup and test if it actually works. That is the solution I wanted to achieve: AWS Cloud Backend If you are curious about the outcome, please watch the video below. I also share my conversation with ChatGPT so you can review it and try to deploy in your AWS account.

By no stretch, that is my natural strength. I like challenges, which is why I’m working on it. I read tons of materials covering various “tips and tricks” of public speaking. Based on my personal experience, it boils down to two points: Preparation Practice When I know that I am well prepared, my stress level goes way down. There is nothing more I could do to improve my performance. I am a huge fan of the iterative approach to systems design and implementation.

This is a sample section from my future training - AWS IoT Services explained: Your Ticket to the IoT World. I am preparing that course as entry-level material for people interested in the Internet of Things domain and AWS Cloud. No programming skills or AWS knowledge is required to benefit from it. In this video, I illustrate the concept of an AWS IoT Thing and how to use it to store information about devices in the AWS Cloud.

I participated in countless meetings where no one dared to ask essential questions. Participants would ask vague, complex queries, pretending to understand the topic at hand. Others would respond in the same unclear way - yet another unproductive meeting leaving everyone involved more confused than enlightened. What if someone dared to ask a simple question like: What do you mean by X? How does X bring us closer to Y? What do we expect when we reach the Y?